Green Bridge to Nowhere

A bridge leading someplace nobody would really want to go.

By Jonathan H. Adler

James Gustave “Gus” Speth is the consummate environmental insider. For over thirty years he has played a key role in the development of environmentalist organizations and agendas. He was present at the founding of the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1970 and later launched the World Resources Institute, a $27 million enterprise that may be the most influential environmental think tank in the world. He served on, and eventually chaired, President Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality, where he oversaw production of the apocalyptic Global 2000 report. During the 1990s he worked on President Clinton’s transition team and headed up the United Nations Development Program, and he is now dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

His prominence within the environmental establishment means that when Gus Speth speaks, environmentalists listen. He is not only an academic dean but, in many respects, the dean of contemporary environmental thinkers. Like others, he advocates ambitious and far-reaching environmental programs; unlike many, he has held positions in which to make such things happen. Few with his green bona fides have his currency in the halls of power or connections with global leaders. Yet like so many celebrated environmental thinkers, he lacks a clear or compelling vision of how to reconcile contemporary civilization with the need for environmental protection.

In The Bridge at the Edge of the World, Speth argues that all the environmental progress of the past thirty to forty years may be for naught, as an environmental crisis of global proportions is still with us. The resource shortfalls and ecological ruin predicted by the Global 2000 report may not have come to pass on schedule, but they are imminent nonetheless. Thus, he seeks radical change to our economic, political, and social systems. “The end of the world as we have known it” is inevitable; the only question is whether we will suffer planetary ruin or a radically transformed civilization. Speth’s hope is to point the way to the latter course.

Speth’s eco-pessimism is not particularly new or original, but his critique of the modern environmental movement could be. In his view, the modern environmental establishment has proven itself impotent. It has accomplished much, but not nearly enough. Working within the system failed, he maintains, because it did not seek sufficiently radical change. Saving human civilization from collapse requires more than minor adjustments, he warns, as environmental degradation is but a symptom of broader social problems, and is “linked powerfully with other social realities, including growing social inequality and neglect and the erosion of democratic governance and popular control.” Reversing course will require a “transformative change in the system itself,” including an “assault on the citadel of consumption” and the remaking of corporations. “Our duty,” Speth proclaims, is “to struggle against the contempocentrism and anthropocentrism that dominate modern life.” A “bridge” to a sustainable society requires revisiting democratic capitalism, remaking industrial civilization, and reorienting human consciousness; “we must return to fundamentals and seek to understand both the underlying forces driving such destructive trends and the economic and political system that gives these forces free rein.” Nothing less will do.

Potemkin Parliament

Washington’s governing systems are in a bad way

By Mark Steyn

The least dispiriting moment of another grim week in Washington was the sight of ornery veterans tearing down the Barrycades around the war memorials on the National Mall, dragging them up the street, and dumping them outside the White House. This was, as Kevin Williamson wrote at National Review, “as excellent a gesture of the American spirit as our increasingly docile nation has seen in years.” Indeed. The wounded vet with two artificial legs balancing the Barrycade on his Segway was especially impressive. It would have been even better had these disgruntled citizens neatly lined up the Barrycades across the front of the White House and round the sides, symbolically Barrycading him in as punishment for Barrycading them out. But, in a town where an unarmed woman can be left a bullet-riddled corpse merely for driving too near His Benign Majesty’s palace and nobody seems to care, one appreciates a certain caution.

By Wednesday, however, it was business as usual. Which is to say the usual last-minute deal just ahead of the usual make-or-break deadline to resume spending as usual. There was nothing surprising about this. Everyone knew the Republicans were going to fold. Folding is what Republicans do. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are so good at folding Obama should hire them as White House valets. So the only real question was when to fold. They could at least have left it for a day or two after the midnight chimes of October 17 had come and gone. It would have been useful to demonstrate that just as the sequester did not cause the sky to fall and the shutdown had zero impact on the life of the country so this latest phoney-baloney do-or-die date would not have led to the end of the world as we know it. If you’re going to place another trillion dollars of debt (or more than the entire national debts of Canada and Australia combined) on the backs of the American people in one grubby late-night deal, you might as well get a teachable moment out of it.

The GOP was concerned about polls showing their approval ratings somewhere between Bashar Assad and the ebola virus, but it’s hard to see why capitulation should command popularity: The late Osama bin Laden’s famous observation about the strong horse and the weak horse has some relevance to domestic politics, too. Republicans spent a lot of time whining that, if Obama was prepared to negotiate with the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Russians, why wouldn’t he negotiate with the GOP? Well, the obvious answer is Rouhani, Assad, and Putin don’t curl up in a fetal position at the first tut-tut from Bob Schieffer or Diane Sawyer.

The thesis of my recent book After America is stated on page six thereof — “that the prevailing political realities of the United States do not allow for any meaningful course correction.” That’s what the political class confirmed yet again this week. Which brings me to the sentence immediately following: “And, without meaningful course correction, America is doomed.”

Finally … Meet the World’s First Ever ‘Climate Refugee’

49,999,999 to Go

by Pater Tenebrarum

Back in April 2011, the UN engaged in what Anthony Watts referred to as 'bureaucratic idiocy at its finest'. It all started with Gavin Atkins asking a fair enough question: “What happened with the climate refugees?” 

“In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. These people, it was said, would flee a range of disasters including sea level rise, increases in the numbers and severity of hurricanes, and disruption to food production.

The UNEP even provided a handy map. The map shows us the places most at risk including the very sensitive low lying islands of the Pacific and Caribbean.

It so happens that just a few of these islands and other places most at risk have since had censuses, so it should be possible for us now to get some idea of the devastating impact climate change is having on their populations. Let’s have a look at the evidence:

Bahamas:

Nassau, The Bahamas – The 2010 national statistics recorded that the population growth increased to 353,658 persons in The Bahamas. The population change figure increased by 50,047 persons during the last 10 years.

St Lucia:

The island-nation of Saint Lucia recorded an overall household population increase of 5 percent from May 2001 to May 2010 based on estimates derived from a complete enumeration of the population of Saint Lucia during the conduct of the recently completed 2010 Population and Housing Census.

Seychelles:

Population 2002, 81755

Population 2010, 88311

Solomon Islands:

The latest Solomon Islands population has surpassed half a million – that’s according to the latest census results.

It’s been a decade since the last census report, and in that time the population has leaped 100-thousand.

Meanwhile, far from being places where people are fleeing, no fewer than the top six of the very fastest growing cities in China, Shenzzen, Dongguan, Foshan, Zhuhai, Puning and Jinjiang, are absolutely smack bang within the shaded areas identified as being likely sources of climate refugees.

Similarly, many of the fastest growing cities in the United States also appear within or close to the areas identified by the UNEP as at risk of having climate refugees.

More censuses are due to come in this year, and we await the results for Bangladesh and the Maldives -said to be places most at risk -with interest.

However, a very cursory look at the first available evidence seems to show that the places identified by the UNEP as most at risk of having climate refugees are not only not losing people, they are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world.” 

(emphasis added)

Oops! After that monumental blunder, you would normally expect the UN to do something along the lines of publishing a press release that could be saying something like: “We hereby concede that we were completely wrong about 'climate refugees'. We  apologize for having unnecessarily contributed to the hysteria and panic over climate change”.

So what did the UN do?

It simply 'disappeared' the site containing its 2005 claims – when clicking on the link, browsers suddenly displayed a '404' error message instead. Then it dispatched one of its employees to comment on Gavin Atkins' article as follows: 

America The Reckless

The Show Must Go On at Any Price

by Michael Spence

The world’s developed countries face growth and employment shortfalls, while developing countries are confronting huge challenges in adapting to increasingly volatile capital flows while adjusting their growth patterns to sustain economic development. And yet America’s political dysfunction has come to marginalize these (and other) crucial issues. It is all very difficult to fathom.

The threat of a default on US sovereign debt has been lifted – for now – but the deeper problem persists: For America’s Republicans and Democrats, negotiating a fiscal grand compromise appears to carry higher costs than playing a game of brinkmanship, even at the risk of default. Surely this involves a collective miscalculation of the longer-term costs.

Setting aside the external impact on the global economy, the damage to domestic stability and growth from anything other than a short-term technical default would be so severe that the political system (and both parties with it) could not withstand the backlash. Domestic and foreign holders of US Treasury bills would regard a deliberate, unforced default as a betrayal of trust.

Some are reassured by this fact, because it suggests that a real default will not happen. And that means that the fragile global economy, dependent (for now) on a single country for its main reserve currency, can withstand America’s political shenanigans.

That may be true, and it may be the only practical choice in the short run. But the US pattern of decision-making (or non-decision-making) has already created additional risk. It will surely be reflected in upward pressure on interest rates, at which point the Federal Reserve will enter the picture.

Philanthropy’s Original Sin

War Against the Weak

In a dark chapter of American history, thousands of people were once forcibly sterilized with the aim of improving the nation’s “genetic stock.” But while state governments and the scientific community have been making amends for eugenics, another set of key players has been all but overlooked: philanthropists, who sought to use their wealth and influence to care for the weak and vulnerable by eliminating them.

By William A. Schambra

Philanthropy has many wonderful qualities — and never tires of proclaiming them, for one quality it sorely lacks is humility. It regularly thumps itself on the back, for instance, for devoting some $300 billion a year to good causes. And though philanthropic spending on social causes is dwarfed by that of the government, foundations proudly claim that dollar for dollar their spending is in fact more effective than the government’s. While government tends to stick with the safe and the routine, philanthropy regularly and energetically seeks out the next new thing; it claims it is at the cutting edge of social change, being innovative, scientific, and progressive. Philanthropy, as legendary Ford Foundation program officer Paul Ylvisaker once claimed, is society’s “passing gear.”

Indeed, philanthropy increasingly prides itself on its ability to shape and guide government spending, testing out potential solutions for social problems and then aggressively advocating for their replication by government. Any employee of a philanthropic organization can immediately tick off a list of major accomplishments of American foundations, all of which followed this pattern of bold experimentation leading to government adoption. For example, Andrew Carnegie’s library program pledged funding to construct the buildings, if the local municipalities would provide the sites and help pay for the libraries’ operation. The Rockefeller Foundation funded a moderately successful hookworm abatement program in the southern United States, which strongly involved local governments. The Ford Foundation’s “gray areas” project in the 1960s experimented with new approaches to urban poverty that then became the basis for the Great Society’s War on Poverty.

And yet, in all this deafening clamor of self-approbation, we rarely hear from these foundations about another undertaking that bears all the strategic hallmarks of American philanthropy’s much-touted successes, with far more significant results: that the first American foundations were deeply immersed in eugenics — the effort to promote the reproduction of the “fit” and to suppress the reproduction of the “unfit.”

Philanthropy vs. Charity

Although some of its animating ideas of course reach much further back into history, modern eugenics began with the mid-nineteenth-century work of Sir Francis Galton, the great English statistician and cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton proposed that talent and high social rank had hereditary origins, and that society could and should give monetary incentives for marriages of and progeny from eminent couples. By the turn of the twentieth century, eugenics was considered a cutting-edge scientific discipline backed up by a growing political and social movement — and therefore a particularly worthy candidate for philanthropists’ attention. It is no surprise, then, that the first major foundations devoted resources not only to the research behind the movement, but also to lobbying for government adoption of eugenic policies: at the federal level, restricting immigration of the “unfit”; at the state level, their mandatory institutionalization and sterilization.

Eugenics was American philanthropy’s first great global success. It inspired and cultivated programs around the world, but nowhere with more consequence than in the nation that sought most fervently to imitate America’s eugenic example, Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

The Obamacare Train Wreck

Defunding or repealing the law is practically impossible, but here’s how we can fix it

by Richard A. Epstein

It is now common knowledge that the bugs in the Obamacare website have been embedded in the system from the start. For the past two weeks, not only have many individuals found it impossible to access the website, but they are often frozen in place once they pass through the initial portal. The problems will just get worse. The current law requires extensive communications between enrollees and their chosen insurance carriers, as well as massive interaction with both federal and state organizations. As a result, web traffic builds up behind bottlenecks and leads to massive frustration. As I warned last May, watching Obamacare unravel is a painful business.

The Bright Side of Bad News

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has tried to put a positive gloss on the messy situation with the dubious observation that the system glitches are due to heavy consumer demand. Her statement subtly implies that the nation’s alleged need for the program is the cause of its momentary glitches. She claims that things are “getting better by the day.” Not so. The government site was not built for heavy traffic, nor was it tested before going live. It is no mean feat to try to fix a balky computer system on the fly.

As a result of these problems, calls to delay the implementation of the individual mandate are now reaching a fever pitch, such as Peggy Noonan’s to delay the individual mandate a year. The bugs need to be worked out before ordinary people are slapped with fines for failing to enroll in the derelict system before the penalty deadline now set for March 31, 2014.

Thus far, the Obama Administration has been mum on the sources and extent of the difficulties. But make no mistake about it: they reflect the broader structural weaknesses of the program, which were hidden from view by the disastrous launch. Nonetheless, the system’s basic design is flawed, and its gaffes will become only more apparent as implementation moves forward.

Toleration and Bias

The Genius of American Citizenship

By Richard Samuelson

Joseph Stalin apparently coined the term "American exceptionalism" to denounce the heresy that Marx's universal historical laws would somehow not apply to the United States. Though it's now clear that every nation is an exception to the historical dialectic that was supposed to culminate in the triumph of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, the U.S. remains an exceptional nation in other crucial ways. Anyone who becomes an American citizen is fully American, from that day forward. By contrast, a naturalized citizen of France, Japan, or Nigeria can live for decades in his new country, and his family can remain there for generations, yet many of the locals will still think of them as foreigners. To be sure, there is an American culture. When traveling around the world, one can often spot other Americans, and not only because of language; dress, deportment, and music often distinguish us. But when it comes to American nationalism, such things are relatively trivial. In America, politics, not culture, makes the nation.

The exceptional character of American nationalism confuses students of nationalism. According to a standard work like Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism (1983), "nationalism uses the pre-existing, historically inherited proliferation of cultures or cultural wealth." Is American a nation in that sense? Not exactly. American identity is bound up with our Union, Constitution, and laws, rather than with tribe, clan, or culture. Thus, one of our early treaties asserted that the U.S. "is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." That stipulation presumes that American identity is primarily political, denying as it does a massive historical and cultural fact—that the vast majority of America's citizens have been Christians. The cultural heritage of most Americans is Christian, and even the American creed draws upon the Judeo-Christian tradition in important ways. In the U.S., however, nation and culture are separate to an unusual degree. That reality, in turn, affects a range of important questions connecting what kind of government America will have to what kind of nation it will be.

Welcoming Immigrants

We Americans often celebrate our ability to turn people from all over the world into Americans. That is not to deny that immigration policy has, periodically, roiled our politics. In the 1790s Federalists worried that refugees from European revolutions would bring their mistaken political ideas to America. The 1850s saw nativist animus against Irish immigrants and, more generally, against growing numbers of Catholics in what had been a predominantly Protestant land. In the early 20th century, popular and Progressive ideas of racial purity influenced the debate. Today, the issue is immigration from South and Central America.

Nihil Scriptum Est

And then again, Nihil Sub Sole Novum

While Santiago Capital's Brent Johnson believes "anything is possible," he warns "there's a catch." While it may be true for the individual (climb Everest, win a gold medal, walk on the moon), it is not true for the world at large because, as he so eloquently notes in this brief presentation, "the best thing we can learn from history is... that the world does not learn from history." And there is indeed plenty that is occurring once again - in oh-so-predictable cycles - that we have seen time and time again... and apparently choose to ignore the conclusion. As Johnson concludes, "you either believe in magic, or you believe in math."

Something here for everyone... 4th Turnings, Kondratieff Waves, Dalio's beautiful deleveraging, the unsustainable nature of the current cycle and the pulling forward of our demand... "you either believe in magic... or you believe in math"

Listen at this great short video at the end of page of:

 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-17/you-either-believe-magic-or-you-believe-math

Desperate Leftists VS Fantasy Fascism

Anti-fascists can't admit that the EDL is crumbling because posturing against this allegedly Nazi grouping is all they have going for them.

By Patrock Hayes

The decision of English Defence League (EDL) founder and leader Tommy Robinson to quit his post last week has prompted much debate. His justification is that the EDL’s street protests against Islamic extremism were ‘no longer productive’ - if, of course, they ever were.

In truth, the EDL has been a spent political force for a couple of years. In 2011, when it was at its peak, it could get together several thousand people for its demos; today, it is hard pushed to reach triple digits. In fact, you’ll find fewer EDL supporters than police officers on a typical EDL demo today, the police’s primary role being to keep the EDL away from the ranks of anti-fascist protesters that trail around after the EDL like aggressive groupies. The EDL doesn’t even have any real membership base to speak of, often referring to the number of ‘Likes’ on its Facebook page as evidence of its alleged popularity.

Given how personality-driven the EDL has been, the departure of the charismatic Robinson, alongside his deputy Kevin Carroll, is likely to prove terminal for the group. Attempts by relative unknowns to assume leadership, most notably former Lincolnshire councillor Elliott Fountain, have led to ridicule and bafflement among followers. A planned demo in Bradford last weekend went ahead and mobilised a few hundred, but it quickly petered out due to a lack of speakers.

It seems that the 30-year-old Robinson’s decision to quit was as much personal as political - he says his political activities were causing his young family problems. But there does seem to be another element to his decision, too. Announcing his departure at a press conference organised by the anti-extremist group the Quilliam Foundation – formed by reformed Islamists – Robinson said the EDL has been hijacked by ‘Nazis’. He has grown tired, it seems, of having to defend the actions of certain ‘extremist right-wing’ members of the EDL, singling out an individual in a press conference who recently sported a tattoo on his chest with a mosque being blown up. ‘I want to lead a revolution against Islamist ideology’, he said. ‘I don’t want to lead a revolution against Muslims.’

My Very Own Argentine Welfare

Ruined by Welfare

By Bill Bonner

Stock market investors seem to have gotten over their joy at Janet Yellen’s appointment as the next chair of the Fed. Now they are focusing on their chagrin at Washington. Without a deal being passed by Congress, the feds will have to stop borrowing tomorrow. On Tuesday, the Dow fell 133. Gold did nothing worth mentioning. As usual, investors are looking in the wrong direction…

Where does real wealth come from?

We will answer the question ourselves: Not from the Fed. Not from the government. Not from stimulus programs. Not from the Democrats. Or the Republicans. Or the Tea Party. Not from Obama. Not from a bipartisan agreement to extend spending and pretend that the feds can pay their bills.

Nope. No gimmicks. No magic. No claptrap formulas. Wealth comes from work, savings and innovation. Typically, somebody works long hours, saves money and starts a business that produces something people want. 

Mountain Zombies

But now, in the mountains of Argentina… as on the fruited plains of the United States of America… the wealth machine has begun to sputter and choke.
We promised to tell you how our real estate investment in Argentina has become a welfare program. Coming right up.

But first, here’s a story from the US as told by The Economist: 

“Established firms are usually in the business of preserving the old world; start-ups are under more pressure to come up with new ideas, and if they do so they usually create lots of new jobs. But these growth machines have broken down. America is not producing as many start-ups as it did a decade ago and those that have been created are providing fewer jobs – less than five each, compared with an historical average of about seven. Start-ups created 2.7 million new jobs in the 2012 financial year compared with 4.7 million in 1999.” 

What went wrong? Zombies. 

“[I]n 2009-11 the Obama administration issued 106 new regulations each expected to have an economic impact of at least $100 million a year. [...] The Vanguard Group, an asset management firm, calculates that since 2011 Washington’s bickering politicians have imposed, in effect, a $261 billion uncertainty tax that has cost up to 1 million new jobs.

The Sarbanes-Oxley act imposes additional costs of $1 million a year on public companies. Investors no longer bother with “growth stocks” because there is more money to be made in making lots of big trades in established firms. The dramatic decline in the number of firms going public since 2001 is worrying because, over the past four decades, more than 90% of jobs created by start-ups came into being after they went public.” 

Similarly, up in the Andes, the Argentine zombies are squeezing out initiative wherever they find it. On the ranch that we bought in Argentina were 25 families living in various nooks and crannies up in the hills. We didn’t even know they were there. Nobody mentioned it.

We were told there were some people who rented some of our land. They paid us in sheep, goats and cattle. We thought they were independent yeomen farmers… and a source of revenue for the farm. Some of them came to visit before we left on Sunday.

The Paradox of Conservative Bioethics

The Necessity and Tragedy of Public Bioethics

By Yuval Levin

Among the more prominent peculiarities of our politics in recent years is that something called “bioethics” has become a key conservative priority. The bioethics movement has been around in America since at least the late 1960s, when the Hastings Center was created as the first bioethics think tank. Its task was to advance the study of the ethics of biology and medicine, and to examine the moral and social significance of new developments in genetics, psychopharmacology, reproductive medicine, and other new frontiers of biological science. The movement has since grown by leaps and bounds, and bioethics has developed into a profession, if not an industry.

Some American conservatives have long shared the concerns that animate bioethics. The pro-life movement has always worried deeply about the treatment of the unborn by scientists and doctors, and many conservatives have through the years been interested in various issues surrounding medical ethics, illicit drug-use, assisted suicide, and other social and cultural matters that have much to do with modern science. But it was not until fairly recently that bioethics emerged as a general and prominent category of concern for the American right.

That concern has been particularly influenced by worries about what has been dubbed the “Brave New World.” This allusion to Aldous Huxley’s famous book hints at a vision of a world reshaped by biotechnology: procreation replaced by manufacture, the pursuit of happiness replaced by drugs, and human nature remade into something lower and shallower, more easily satisfied but less capable of greatness and awe. This general vision has expressed itself in specific disquiet about reproductive technologies like cloning and genetic engineering; about the transformation of human embryos into research tools and raw materials; about psychoactive drugs and assorted enhancement technologies; and about a wide array of other attempts to fundamentally reshape human life through biology and medicine. American conservatives have begun to think hard about “where biotechnology may be taking us,” as Leon Kass puts it, and what we might do about it.

The resulting intellectual and political activity has melded some of the interests of the pro-life movement with those of conservatives more concerned with the general culture and its institutions, and it has formed, through that combination, an altogether plausible conservative program. This trend, together with several sensational recent advances in biotechnology, has sent bioethics toward the top of the agenda of the American right. President Bush’s first prime-time address to the nation was about his new policy on the funding of embryonic stem cell research. Human cloning has been prominent on the congressional agenda for much of the past two years. And a substantial portion of the intellectual energy of the conservative movement has been devoted to the cause of a new bioethics.

The trouble with money

Modeling Money

by Robert P. Murphy

Non-economists often think that "economists study money." The reality, though, is that most academic economists hardly think about money at all. Whether we're talking about tariffs, wages, Social Security taxes, or pollution, the analysis (though often couched in dollar terms for the benefit of the general public) really is grounded in microeconomics and would work just as well if we were talking about a barter economy. In fact, in a typical Ph.D. program, students study models with money in them only when explicitly trying to answer questions about central-bank policy. Even in these cases—in which the very purpose is to draw conclusions about appropriate monetary policy—the underlying logic of the model doesn't really have a role for money. Instead, economists insert money into the model somewhat awkwardly, through various ad hoc assumptions.

Capitalism, Socialism or Fascism?

Whatever you call it, it is a very dangerous system

By WashingtonsBlog

What is the current American economy: capitalism, socialism or fascism?

Socialism

Many people call the Bush and Obama administration’s approach to the economic crisis “socialism”.

Are they right?

Well, Nouriel Roubini writes in a recent essay:

This is a crisis of solvency, not just liquidity, but true deleveraging has not begun yet because the losses of financial institutions have been socialised and put on government balance sheets. This limits the ability of banks to lend, households to spend and companies to invest…

The releveraging of the public sector through its build-up of large fiscal deficits risks crowding out a recovery in private sector spending.

Let's Get the U.S. Debt Default Over With

Why it’s inevitable and why postponing it will exacerbate its consequences

by Martin Hutchinson
Washington has been consumed by negotiations about avoiding a debt default. On all sides we are told how irresponsible and disastrous it would be to allow the United States to default on its debt obligations. That's quite correct: it would be irresponsible and disastrous. But given the fiscal and monetary policies of the last five years, and the slim-to-none chance of getting them reversed in the near future, such a default is inevitable in the long run. Thus we might as well get it over with, since the earlier we default, the smaller the amount of wealth and living standards that will be wiped out.

The excess of government debt isn't just a U.S. problem, far from it. The IMF's Fiscal Monitor "Taxing Times" released this week, sets out the bloating of government debt worldwide over the last five years.  U.S. gross public debt has increased from 73.3% of GDP in 2008 to a projected 106.7% of GDP in 2013, an increase of 33.4 percentage points, or 6.7 percentage points a year. That's not as large as the total deficits, because even if real GDP hasn't grown much, nominal GDP has, reducing the debt/GDP ratio. 

The 1970s, in this respect, were in retrospect a healthy period, in which the large budget deficits (but nothing like as large as recently) were wiped out by inflation, so the U.S. debt/GDP ratio actually fell. Compared to the 1970s, the last few years have seen even slower growth, low but not zero inflation and budget deficits (from the middle of this decade to be joined by rapidly growing social security and Medicare deficits) a multiple of their 1970s size. In consequence, the debt/GDP ratio has grown at a rapid clip. 

6.7 percentage points a year is a LOT; it's more than double the rate of growth of nominal GDP, which itself includes a chunk of inflation. Thus the rise in debt is swallowing more than twice as much as the economy generates in new output each year. Needless to say, this is completely unsustainable.

The problem is not confined to the U.S. Britain's problem is almost as bad; gross debt there increased from 51.9% of GDP in 2008 to a projected 82.1% of GDP, an increase of 30.2 percentage points, or 6.2 percentage points a year—again double the increase in nominal GDP, which in Britain has consisted almost entirely of inflation. This is not due to British "austerity"—policies since May 2010 have slowed the debt increase somewhat, but killed the economy, since they involved heavy tax rises and very few genuine spending cuts. 

The eurozone's performance as a whole has not been quite as bad—the debt/GDP ratio has increased by 25.4 percentage points, or 5.1 percentage points a year—still more than double the eurozone's feeble nominal GDP growth. 

Obesity is not a disease

Pretending otherwise will stoke an epidemic and crush the NHS

By Max Pemberton

‘Well, what diets have you tried so far?’ asked the GP, flicking through the patient’s notes. I was an innocent trainee doctor on my general practice placement at the time and watched the interaction carefully, sensing a row was about to ensue. ‘Look, I don’t want to go on a diet, I want you to prescribe me these,’ snapped the patient, bringing out a neatly folded page she had torn out of a magazine. The GP, rolling his eyes at me, took the paper but didn’t read it. I suspected he’d read it before. This was yet another example of what’s becoming a very British epidemic: obesity being self-diagnosed as disease.

The doctor attempted to explain that tablets really aren’t suitable in her case. As well as having some potentially nasty side effects, they’re expensive to prescribe, and don’t offer a long-term solution. This was clearly not what the woman wanted to hear. ‘Fine then, don’t help me, see if I care. I’ll get my sister to get them off her GP — he gives her whatever she wants’; and she stormed out. It struck me as bizarre that while some people using the NHS are dangerously malnourished, other people are desperate to take tablets to ensure that their food passes through their body unabsorbed, while the taxpayer foots the bill.

It happens all the time. The patients who are not interested in changing their diet in any way, demanding to have their cake, eat it and then pop a pill so that the calories never touch their waistline. And as a result, Britain now combines austerity with obesity. The majority of us are now overweight or obese — a third of children are considered too heavy. It costs an extra £5 billion a year, and 300 hospital admissions a day are directly due to obesity. To pick up the newspapers is to witness a country adjusting itself to losing a national battle of the bulge.

Take the East Midlands Ambulance Service. It emerged this week that it has been picking up so many fat patients — weighing in excess of the 28-stone maximum — that it needs a new fleet. It has, hitherto, been struggling along with just one ambulance for fatties (a ‘bariatric’ vehicle), but now thinks all 272 of its ambulances need to be upgraded with double-wide stretchers for patients who (it says) can weigh in at 55 stone. The plan will cost £27 million.

Why Paul Krugman should never be taken seriously again

Where I come from, we do not fear bullies. We despise them.

By Niall Ferguson

It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good. The financial crisis that came to a head five years ago with the failure of Lehman Brothers has been especially beneficial to the economist Paul Krugman. In his widely read New York Times column and blog, Krugman regularly boasts that he has been ‘right’ about the crisis and its consequences. As he wrote in June last year:

‘I (and those of like mind) have been right about everything.’

Those who dare to disagree with him — myself included — he denounces as members of the ‘Always-Wrong Club.‘

He wrote back in April:

‘Maybe I actually am right and maybe the other side actually does contain a remarkable number of knaves and fools. … Look at the results: again and again, people on the opposite side prove to have used bad logic, bad data, the wrong historical analogies, or all of the above. I’m Krugtron the Invincible!’

That last allusion is to the 1980s science fiction superhero, Voltron (below). The resemblance between Krugman and Voltron was suggested by one of the gaggle of bloggers who are to Krugman what Egyptian plovers are to crocodiles.

As a Princeton professor and Nobel Prize winner, Krugman is indeed widely believed to be intellectually invincible. He himself acknowledges having made only two mistakes, both predating the crisis: the impact of information technology on productivity, which he underestimated, and the significance of the federal deficits of the Bush administration, which he overestimated.

‘In the Great Recession and aftermath, however, I went with [my] models — and they worked!’

‘Let those who are without error cast the first stone,’ Krugman wrote back in 2010. Unfortunately, this is not an injunction he himself has heeded. Repeatedly, over the last five years, he has heaped opprobrium on others. His latest performance is characteristic; perhaps not quite intentionally he even refers to ‘my own unpleasantness with Ferguson’.

Sterile Thinking

A society that brutally separates the fit from the unfit paves the way to its own self-inflicted horrors

This winter is the centenary of the first mandatory sterilization laws in the United States, a major milestone in the eugenics movement. In 1907, as a precondition to parole, some 300 Indiana prisoners came forward to be sterilized. Holding that “heredity plays a most important part in the transmission of crime, idiocy, and imbecility,” the state legislature passed the first law that March permitting prisons to require sterilization “to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists.”

This was the first legislative application of the notion of “negative eugenics” — the idea that the undesirable elements of society could be reduced by preventing their reproduction. A flurry of states followed Indiana’s example, although many of their statutes were quickly overturned in court. Few sterilization operations were actually performed until the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, ruled that 

“it is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

This opinion bears an uncanny resemblance to a passage penned in 1924 in Germany: 

“To prevent defective persons from reproducing equally defective offspring, is an act dictated by the clearest light of reason.... It would prevent the unmerited suffering of millions of persons, and above all would, in the end, result in a steady increase in human welfare.” 

These lines from Mein Kampf were put into practice when the Nazis came to power in 1933. American eugenics advocates, who could not know the full horrors to come, lauded the Nazis for “proceeding toward a policy that will accord with the best thought of eugenists in all civilized countries.” Years later, defendants at Nuremberg appealed to American precedent at their trials.

In the United States, tacit public support of compulsory sterilization eventually led to enthusiastic participation by asylums and prisons, even as scientific criticism of sterilization’s eugenic assumptions deepened. In 1934, the American Neurological Association created a committee to investigate the practice in institutions for the mentally ill; it found no scientific basis for a sterilization program, and caustically remarked that “the race is not going to the dogs, as has been the favorite assertion for some time.” Nevertheless, eugenic sterilization did not significantly abate until after World War II. By the 1960s, when the practice finally crept out of favor, an estimated 60,000 people had been sterilized in the United States.

What was lost goes well beyond the harm to individuals and the betrayal of basic justice in Buck v. Bell (which was never overturned). The desire to avoid the birth of disabled or troubled individuals is of course understandable. But a society that implements this desire by brutally separating the fit from the unfit paves the way to its own self-inflicted horrors. We forget the dark lessons of our eugenic history at our own peril.